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Nov 2, 2017, 11:00am

How To Build An International Marketing Strategy That Adopts The 'Mother Tongue'

David Bensoussan is CEO of StartHub Accelerator, a consumer-centric dev. company specialized in U.S. Soft Landing Strategies.

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Launching your business overseas can be an exciting and frightening endeavor. When you enter a new market, you will have new customers, new employees and new partners. It is important not to blindly follow the same marketing strategy as your home operations. Of course you should retain your company values and purpose, but you will need to adapt your strategy to your new market. Here are some of the top tips my soft landing team and I use when creating a marketing strategy for launching a foreign subsidiary in the U.S.

Test your market.

In the beginning, you should stay lean and agile so that you can adapt to the new market. For this reason, you should always test your market. Dip your toe in the water before you dive in. The idea here is to enter the market slowly and with control in order to gain traction before a full-blown expansion. In this way, you can mitigate risk and save both money and time.

When you test the market before fully committing you can be flexible, iterating the business model, product/service and messaging as needed until you find the perfect fit for your target market. This is your opportunity to perform hands-on research on your customers to develop the perfect offering.

In addition, if you stay lean and the market is not a success, you can easily exit the market without too much loss. In comparison, businesses that expand to a new market with full-fledged operations will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and could potentially lose it all.

Understand your customers.

Perhaps one of the most important tips for building your international strategy is to understand your customers. In new markets, you will have new customers. Assuming their behavior will be the same as your home-based customers is a big mistake.

The customers for your foreign subsidiary will have a different culture. This means their buying behavior will be very different. For example, when Wal-Mart expanded into China, they mistakenly operated and ran with their usual "big box store" approach. However, people in China are more accustomed to buying their groceries at local outdoor markets and favor this environment. This has caused their efforts in that market to be a bit less effective than their local competitor.

It is important to take the time to really get to know your new customers. Many companies will take a trip to their new market before opening their foreign subsidiary in order to observe their new customers firsthand. You can also hire a marketing research company to conduct a study of your new target market. If you are on a budget, you may also consider buying consumer reports from major marketing research firms, like Nielsen in the American market.

Adopt the mother tongue.

In addition to knowing your customers, you need to communicate with them in their mother tongue. Marketing communications in a new market can be very complex. Every bit of communication from your company to your new market needs to adapt to the language and culture.

Even though you are becoming a global brand, you will need to keep all of your messaging locally focused. This includes advertising, packaging, online and verbal communication from your sales team and customer service. Your international marketing strategy should take into consideration, not only the primary language of your new target market but also their idiomatic expressions, culturally acceptable methods of communication, etc.

For example, Lays Potato chips use the brand name “Smiths” in Australia because it resonates better with the local consumers. They keep their logo the same to remain consistent, but their messaging changes with the local culture and language.

In conclusion, building an international marketing strategy can be complicated. However, throughout these three tips, we always focus on one thing: the customers. By focusing on the customers and their needs you can have the confidence to make better business decisions.